How Navan Coded Company Policy Onto the Card to Kill the Expense Report with Yuval Refua

Yuval Refua is the Chief Product Officer at Navan, the global travel and expense platform he joined seven years ago when it was still just a travel booking service. Since then, he has built out its payments and expense products from the ground up, turning the company policy that used to live in a PDF into code that runs on the card itself. This conversation matters because T&E is one of the most universally disliked workflows in business, and Navan is rethinking it from scratch just as AI and agentic commerce start to reshape how companies spend.What We CoveredFalling in love with credit cards at American ExpressWhy Navan started as a travel-only booking serviceThe reconciliation pain that led to launching a cardCoding company policy directly onto the cardReal-time approval the moment you swipeWhy travel-first beats procurement-firstContext as the key to managing distributed spendGoing global with VAT, GST, per diems and mileageThe e-invoicing wave hitting more countriesThe GTA model for revealing complexity graduallyThe Expense Admin Companion and recommended actionsFrom single approvals to bulk to full automationThe Visa partnership and the Connect productWaymo for travelers, Formula One for financeKey TakeawaysThe expense report exists to answer a question that company policy already settled. Coding that policy onto the card removes the work instead of automating it.Starting from travel gives Navan context (where the employee is, why they are there, who they are visiting) that procurement-first tools lack, which makes per-employee limits far smarter.Going global is less about features and more about mastering country-by-country tax, e-invoicing, per diem and mileage rules.The path to full automation runs through trust. Navan moves finance teams from a single recommended action, to bulk approvals, to hands-off automation, which is also how it intends to handle agentic spend.About Yuval RefuaYuval Refua is Chief Product Officer at Navan. He started two companies of his own early in his career before moving into fintech and product management at Thomson Reuters, then American Express, where he developed a deep love for credit cards and the rails behind them. He joined Navan around seven years ago and has built out its payments and expense products from the ground up.Connect with Fintech One-on-One:Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes